Putting Dirt in Its Place: the Contemporary Politics of Waste

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

Keynote Open Public Lecture: 'Overflows, Agencement, and Inequalities of the Circular Economy', Professor Zsuzsa Gille (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Friday June 2nd: 16:15h

Accompanied by a pop-up exhibition in Alison Richards Building

This conference explores the socio-material interfaces where waste meets politics in the present. It brings together a group of established and emergent waste scholars from across the social sciences to discuss the contemporary dynamics of waste and waste labour in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Five themed panels - on infrastructure, labour, circulation, elimination and reconceptualization– provide a structure through which waste will be explored in all its complexity.

Drawing largely on ethnographic research, presenters will discuss how legal, regulatory, cultural, bio-political and economic factors influence what is configured and classified as waste. Can we speak of ‘waste regimes’? What role do religion, class and race play in determining the division of waste labour? Are formalization and privatization of waste management leading to the dignification or dispossession of waste workers? Can ethnographic and sociological explorations of the materialities of waste politics challenge normative understandings and definitions of waste, commodity and value? Are ideas like 'zero waste' and the 'circular economy' green modernist fables or realizable policies, and how do they reconfigure existing patterns of accumulation and inequality?

More information and registration can be found here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26943